Italicizing punctuation

This is the smartest sumary I've seen. Reading the CMS sections always makes my eyes cross.

http://the-word-blog.com/2009/04/28/formatting-ink-italics-punctuation/

If you're planning on trade/commeical publication, don't sweat this too much. The typesetter has special tools to make it easier -- and they publixher will have their own stylesheet.

Standardizing is good, just don't tie yourself up on knots about it.

This is waaaaaaaaaaay down on the list of things to worry about.

caw

Yarp that, blacbird. I rarely if ever underline or italicize in my writing. Let the words speak for themselves, rather than batting a reader over the head with italics as if to say, "Hey, these words are really, really important!"

geekgerl said:

Thank you all for your replies!

To give a little context, I'm a (Type A) unpublished writer who's working on the final revisions of my first novel manuscript. I've heard that bad formatting is an immediate turnoff to potential agents, especially when the submitter is unpublished.

Maybe my question is too picky to matter to agents, in which case I'll just go for consistency

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In this case, bad formatting means: using Comic Sans MS, not double-spacing your MS, not numbering your pages, forgetting your intents, having extra spacing between paragraphs, having zero margins, etc. There is no agent alive who will let italicized punctuation influence their opinion of your work. Don't worry about it one bit

Base rule of thumb from my editor, if the whole sentence is in italics, so is the punctuation. If it's a selected word or words in the sentence, then only the characters in those words should be in italics. As a caveat, that might be house style.

geekgerl said:

Thank you all for your replies!

To give a little context, I'm a (Type A) unpublished writer who's working on the final revisions of my first novel manuscript. I've heard that bad formatting is an immediate turnoff to potential agents, especially when the submitter is unpublished.

Maybe my question is too picky to matter to agents, in which case I'll just go for consistency

Click to expand...

Bad formatting means the ms. is hard to read.

Consistency is your friend. Checking specific editors/publisher's submissions guidelines and adjusting your format to fit is smart.

This is not a thing to agonize over.

I know you're asking with regard to accepted style, but this can be a big deal in the digital world where formatting engines can often be confused.

Take this, for instance:

"No way!" she said.

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When converting this to another format (*cough* Epub *cough*), if the end of a line happens to fall between the exclamation point and the close quotation mark, the formatting engine should pull that line break to the front of the previous word (way in this case).

But if you change from italics to standard typeface between the exclamation point and the quotation mark, then that's enough to confuse the formatting engine in to thinking the two can be separated with a line break. Consequently, you'll have lines beginning with the closing quotation marks (and other punctuation) that actually belong on the lines above.

You get:

She rose to her feet and said, "No way!
" Of course, she was being silly.

instead of:

She rose to her feet and said, "No
way!" Of course she was being silly.

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So, yeah, when submitting to an editor, just keep it consistent, and house rules will be applied.

But when publishing electronically -- especially if you're self publishing -- you'll save yourself a lot of headaches if you italicize all punctuation that touches italicized text, or touches punctuation that touches italicized text.

VoireyLinger said:

Base rule of thumb from my editor, if the whole sentence is in italics, so is the punctuation. If it's a selected word or words in the sentence, then only the characters in those words should be in italics. As a caveat, that might be house style.

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this is what I had always understood

VoireyLinger said:

Base rule of thumb from my editor, if the whole sentence is in italics, so is the punctuation. If it's a selected word or words in the sentence, then only the characters in those words should be in italics. As a caveat, that might be house style.

Click to expand...

Great rule of thumb.

However, note that the quotation marks should NOT be italicized unless they are within a block of italicized text (according to most house styles).

I know this is a old thread, but I'm going to add this great post by Robert J. Sawyer on the subject.